Zelenskyy courts allies amid airstrikes near his hometown
KYIV, Ukraine — President Volodymyr Zelenskyy worked Thursday to add political momentum to Ukraine’s recent military gains against Russia, while missile strikes that caused flooding near his hometown demonstrated Moscow’s determination to reclaim the battlefield advantage.
A week after a Ukrainian counteroffensive caused Russian troops to retreat from a northeast region, Zelenskyy met with European Union chief Ursula von der Leyen during her third wartime visit to Kyiv. Von der Leyen publicly conveyed the wholehearted support of the 27-nation bloc and wore an outfit in Ukraine’s national colors.
“It’s absolutely vital and necessary to support Ukraine with the military equipment they need to defend themselves. And they have proven that they are able to do this, if they are well equipped,” she said.
Highlighting the breadth of the nearly seven months of fighting, air raid sirens blared several times in the Ukrainian capital during von der Leyen’s meeting with Zelenskyy.
Ukrainian officials said Russian missile strikes on a reservoir dam near Kryvyi Rih, Zelenskyy’s birthplace and the largest city in central Ukraine, sent water raging through some streets. More than 100 homes were flooded.
Russian military bloggers charged the attack was intended to flood areas downstream where Ukrainian forces made inroads as part of their counteroffensive. The Ukrainian head of the local government later reported a second attack on the dam.
The first attack so close to his roots angered Zelenskyy, who said the strikes had no military value.
“In fact, hitting hundreds
of thousands of ordinary civilians is another reason why Russia will lose,” he said.
Also Thursday, the U.N. atomic agency’s 35-nation Board of Governors passed a resolution calling on Moscow to immediately end its occupation of the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant in Ukraine.
In Washington, a volunteer Ukrainian medic who was captured in Ukraine’s besieged port city of Mariupol told U.S. lawmakers Thursday of comforting fellow detainees during her three months in Russian captivity, cradling them as male, female and child prisoners succumbed to torture and untreated wounds.
Ukrainian Yuliia Paievska, who was detained by pro-Russian forces in March and held at shifting locations in Russian-allied territory in Ukraine’s Donetsk region, spoke to lawmakers with the Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe, better known as the Helsinki Commission.
Paievska, giving her most detailed public account of her time in captivity, described “prisoners in cells screaming for weeks, and then dying from the torture without any medical help.”
She continued: “Then in this torment of hell, the only things they feel before death is abuse and additional beating.”
Also Thursday, European Parliament completed the drawn-out process of approving a $5 billion preferential loan to Ukraine, the key part of a $9 billion aid package to offset the cost of war.
Zelenskyy said more assistance cannot come quickly enough. He insisted that the West needed to impose more sanctions on the Kremlin and to provide more weapons for his frontline soldiers to use.
Zelenskyy said that the only way to guarantee the security of Ukrainians is to “close the sky” over the country with air defense systems provided by Western allies.
The Biden administration on Thursday slapped sanctions on dozens of Russian and Ukrainian officials and a number of Russian companies for human rights abuses and the theft of Ukrainian grain.
The State Department said it had imposed sanctions on at least 23 officials and 31 Russian government agencies and companies for their roles in supporting Russia’s war in Ukraine.